Western Digital's disks to be targeted at cloud storage solutions.

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Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), which is now a subsidiary of hard drive manufacturer Western Digital, announced yesterday that it will soon be bringing to market a sealed hard disk drive filled with helium instead of air.

Helium is cheap... for now

At the moment, helium is cheap, primarily because the US government built up a large surplus supply, then decided to get out of the helium business. But the Earth has a finite supply, and the gas is absolutely essential for uses like chilling the LHC and MRI machines, so there have been fears that the helium firesale will leave us a dwindling stock of this critical resource. A bill has been introduced in the Senate that would revamp the US' helium policy, but it's currently languishing in committee.

Hard disk drives today are not sealed—they have breathing holes (covered inside with activated-carbon microfilters) through which air is drawn in and expelled. As the drive's platters spin, their motion drags the air inside the drive along their surface with a shearing force similar to how the bow of a boat drags water along with it, creating what's called an air bearing. The drive's read and write heads float on this air bearing just a few billionths of a meter above the drive's surface.

According to Computerworld and CRN, HGST's new helium-filled drives will contain more platters and more read/write heads than air-filled disks, which will translate to higher storage capacities. This is possible because helium is far less dense than air, and the lower density of the gas means that turbulence inside the drive (from external motion or from the movement of the head actuators themselves) will have less of an effect on the position of the read and write heads. This makes more precise head positioning possible, which translates directly to being able to read and write smaller data tracks on the surface of the platters.

How much smaller? Quite a bit—though HGST isn't releasing exact numbers, it is saying that the new technology could lead to 40 percent higher data density on the drive platters. Additionally, replacing air with helium will cause less drag on the platters as they spin, reducing the energy consumed by the drives by more than 20 percent. This isn't a huge amount of energy saved for a single disk, but a data center stuffed with thousands of the sealed helium drives would demonstrate very real cost savings over one using traditional air-filled hard disk drives. Indeed, HGST is directly positioning the drives to be used in cloud infrastructure and large corporate data centers.

Pricing and release dates aren't yet known, though HGST expects the drives to be available some time in 2013.

Promoted Comments

Yeah, there is no helium shortage. All helium on Earth is a product of radioactive decay within the Earth's crust. The helium accumulates in the same places for the same reasons that natural gas does, and is pumped out of the ground along with the natural gas. As long as stuff keeps decaying in the crust and we keep pumping natural gas out of the ground, we won't run out of helium.

For these 10 gazillionth time...there IS NO HELIUM SHORTAGE. There is plenty of helium. What there is is lack of production systems. The US dumped a crap load on the market which essentially drove producers out of the market. Now that its starting to be scarce you will see producers start to process, store and sell it at more reasonable pricing.

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Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and human space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com

Interesting: I always thought hard drives were sealed. Why aren't they sealed? I assume there is a good reason, and given that the helium ones would have to be sealed, that reason would be a trade-off for the helium drives.

Lovely, we are going to be using up a non-renewable resource so that we can fit more on our hard disks. A non-replaceable resource that is needed for a lot of medical devices and a fair number of scientific devices.

They couldn't use one of the many other less dense then air gases that aren't non-renewable? *sigh*

Well, .... yeah? Since the article states that they will be targeted for data centers (corporate/cloud) one would assume these are enterprise class drives, where reliability is critical. The extra engineering that goes into these are well worth it. Trust me, in these situations cost is secondary to uptime.

As a side note, given they are using helium filled drives, one would imagine the heads would float a bit closer to the platters. I would think that head crashes might be more prevalent as well if these guys were jostled around as happens more often when not rack mounted. Granted that would not be the case in data centers, but for consumer level equipment that could be a issue as well. Not a major one mind you given the increased reliably afforded by accelerometer detection motion nowadays, but one none the less.

Lovely, we are going to be using up a non-renewable resource so that we can fit more on our hard disks. A non-replaceable resource that is needed for a lot of medical devices and a fair number of scientific devices.

They couldn't use one of the many other less dense then air gases that aren't non-renewable? *sigh*

We need all that helium for balloons. Why doesn't anyone think of the children?

Interesting: I always thought hard drives were sealed. Why aren't they sealed? I assume there is a good reason, and given that the helium ones would have to be sealed, that reason would be a trade-off for the helium drives.

Unsealed but filtered allows for changes in atmospheric pressure without flexing the casing.

On a lighter note as an example try driving from a coastal city to Boulder Colorado with a couple bags of unopened chips. My wife, kids, and I were laying bets as to when they would explode when on the final leg of the journey.

Is this correct? A quick Google search didn't pull up anything, but I might have missed something. One would thing that using a small diameter noble gas would be the way to go, as it's nonreactive. Hydrogen, even though found naturally as H2, can still be reactive as it's a pretty good proton donor. Sometimes does not play nice with metals.

My first though was vacuum, no air current, no air friction. no air. The only issue would be heat disposal because the only way to do it is via radiation.

My Idea Patent Pending...

Hard disk drives can't function in a vacuum. You have to have a fluid bearing of some sort (like one of air, or helium) to hold the heads off of the disk surface. Having the heads directly touch the medium is unworkable because of friction and wear; machining the read/write assembly arms to nanometer tolerance to simply hold the heads where they need to be is impossible.

Is this correct? A quick Google search didn't pull up anything, but I might have missed something. One would thing that using a small diameter noble gas would be the way to go, as it's nonreactive. Hydrogen, even though found naturally as H2, can still be reactive as it's a pretty good proton donor. Sometimes does not play nice with metals.

Is this correct? A quick Google search didn't pull up anything, but I might have missed something. One would thing that using a small diameter noble gas would be the way to go, as it's nonreactive. Hydrogen, even though found naturally as H2, can still be reactive as it's a pretty good proton donor. Sometimes does not play nice with metals.

That *whooshing* sound is the Hindenburg flying over your head.

More specifically, the Hindenburg was designed to float using helium, but due to a shortage of the gas, was filled with hydrogen on its fateful last flight.

For these 10 gazillionth time...there IS NO HELIUM SHORTAGE. There is plenty of helium. What there is is lack of production systems. The US dumped a crap load on the market which essentially drove producers out of the market. Now that its starting to be scarce you will see producers start to process, store and sell it at more reasonable pricing.

Um,I do see a problem with this though. Helium is very hard to keep contained. It has a tendency to difuse through nearly anything. Now I guess at STP any diffusion would lead to a partial vacuum and help hold the rest in but would this lead to a failure mode that standard drives would not have?

And while I guess you could recycle the helium just like any other parts of the drive.They would have to be maintaned in good condition to prevent leaks until they could be placed in a collection chamber and opened.

Yeah, there is no helium shortage. All helium on Earth is a product of radioactive decay within the Earth's crust. The helium accumulates in the same places for the same reasons that natural gas does, and is pumped out of the ground along with the natural gas. As long as stuff keeps decaying in the crust and we keep pumping natural gas out of the ground, we won't run out of helium.

Is this correct? A quick Google search didn't pull up anything, but I might have missed something. One would thing that using a small diameter noble gas would be the way to go, as it's nonreactive. Hydrogen, even though found naturally as H2, can still be reactive as it's a pretty good proton donor. Sometimes does not play nice with metals.